I just signed up for next month’s Jingle Bell Run.  Perhaps I’m still on a high from this morning’s Seattle Marathon 5K, but I’m eagerly looking forward to this next race.  Registration was $30.00.  For that fee I get a chip-timed race result, a T-shirt, and all the free goodies I can ask for at the post-race vendor tables.

I don’t know anyone with arthritis (I think), and am not particularly adept at fundraising, so I signed up as an individual vs. as part of a team that commits to raising funds.  I suppose part of me wishes I were the type of person that could go out and enthusiastically buttonhole everyone I know to contribute money for a worthy cause, but that’s just not me.  On the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of changes in myself over the last couple years, so next year, who knows…

An interesting tidbit about the registration process.  I didn’t even know where, or how far, the race was until after the fact.  I found out by clicking on “Event Details” that it’s a 5K, and it starts somewhere near Westlake Center on Sunday the 13th.  Looking further, I found a PDF-format course map that shows that the race starts at 5th and Pine and ends “approximately 6.9 meters from [the] lamp post on [the] corner” of 6th and Pine.  Interesting.

Training?  Well, based on today’s result I’ll be doing a lot more speed work – intervals, mostly.  I need to get more comfortable running fast, because my base endurance is good enough for a race of this length.  I’ll probably try to get outdoors as well, because running on the pavement is way different (and more difficult) than running on the treadmill at the gym.

So, what are you waiting for?  Sign up and join me for the race!

They’re not the same language, and don’t even share any direct ancestry, but whenever I run into nonsense like this:

I shake my fist at the Java programming language, because I attribute this sort of harebrained semantics and/or method naming to the fact that “JavaScript” contains “Java” in its name.

Seriously, what kind of lame developer would create a method on a Date object called “setFullYear” – and have it take a month and a date as well as a year?  Grrrrr.

Flame away.

So this morning I struggled out of bed after a near-sleepless night and prepared for my first road race in over five years.  True, it was only a 5K.  True, I had limited expectations.  But I still had a wonderful time, and learned a thing or two that I can apply to my next race(s), because I’m DEFINITELY doing more of this in the future.

My goal was to complete the race at a 9 minute/mile pace, and I exceeded that with an 8:43 minute/mile pace, 27:04 overall.  I rarely felt like I was going too slow or too fast, and finished strong with a little bit left in the tank.

We ran an out-and-back course along 5th Avenue, with a slight detour at Vine down to 2nd avenue and up the back side of Seattle Center, finishing right by the International Fountain.  The hardest part for me?  Right around mile 2, I felt like I was going a bit too fast, and focused on my breathing for a minute to get back in my rhythm.  The easiest part?  Relative to the other runners, the uphill sections felt easy – all the stair work has developed my quads into hill-climbing monsters.  I passed a lot of people on the two uphill sections.

What I learned:

• Don’t arrive too early.  Prompt lil’ ole me showed up at Seattle Center at about 7:00, which was about 45 minutes too early.
• There is no bag check for the 5K.  This, I should note, is contrary to what is in the race guide.  I had to run back to the car to deposit my warmup layers and bag before the race.
• The little ankle strap that holds your chip timer can chafe.  Wear it around your sock, not your bare flesh, because I got chafed and a little bloody.  No big deal.
• Figure out where you should start based on pace, and elbow your way in.  I spent the first half-mile evading walkers and other slow runners, because I started too far back.

The nicest part?  Seeing my kids near the finish line with homemade signs that said “Yay” and “Daddy”.  That was unexpected, and warmed my heart.  Both my kids said they want to run a race, which gives me about two years until they’re faster than me

It was also great to see fellow geeks @marinamartin and @awoods at the starting line.  Looking forward to seeing both of you at the Jingle Bell Run next month!

I had a nice chat tonight with a friend who is a published author.  True, his work is only available for purchase in the UK – some weird tax ruling has yet to be put in place, I think – but still, published.  He’s a super guy and chatting with him brought back wonderful memories from elementary school and junior high, when life was young and bright, a newly-pressed penny, and one was optimistic and bold or timid as the case may be; when traumas were all of the made-up sort (in retrospect, obviously); when the weight of the world was not yet yoked around your shoulders, immense, solid, visible even when you shut your eyes, peripherally omnipresent, soundlessly pulling you down to earth and dust.

Chatting with him also reminded me that I have short stories floating around and I need to carve out the time to put them to paper.  I think I recently mentioned I have thought up a new story – but  it’s not a story until I write it down.   Then it’s a bad story.   Then I edit, and it gets better; then it gets submitted, and rejected, and I edit again, and it gets a little better; until finally some publisher, drunk on wine or reeling from a bad day, accepts it at a flat fee of $75 to be published in the Rural Vermonter Quarterly; to be read by seven people, four of whom are Facebook friends of mine.

Then, as a published author, I can develop a drinking problem, a penchant for shotguns and sayings like “birds on the wing”, and start flame wars with editors who reject my magnum opera.

But! – get published first.  The cart goes after the horse, the better for the cart to realize that the path can oft be a shitty one.

In other news, I’m being asked to look at a new change in my life as an opportunity.  I suppose that this should be the default attitude, right?  Every change is an opportunity, a chance for growth, for learning, for perspective – but right now, part of me is still very firmly rooted in a Never-Never-Land of the past, where I’m dueling Captain Hook to taste the drops of water left on deck from the splash made when 2009 was dropped overboard.  I have to shake that sort of thinking, and move on to more positive terrain.  It’s an incremental journey at best, and like a good game of chess, full of reversals and board positions that are better or worse and uncertain outcomes and hundreds of opportunities to make the right decisions.  Unlike chess, however, it doesn’t really matter who wins – black or white – because here the object is merely to get to the end, to put in the time, finish the game, fold up the board, breathe a sigh, and move forward.

Today I went to the Seattle Marathon Health and Fitness Expo at the Westin and picked up my race packet for tomorrow’s 5K.  It was only sort of a madhouse, with tons of vendors and relatively few freebies.  I should have taken photos – I’m a curator of my own experience, along with the rest of you, after all – but forgot.  Tomorrow morning I line up with the other runners and will have a post sometime this weekend describing my experience.  Wish me luck!

Lots of confusion out there over the exact meaning of the adjective “black” in the phrase “Black Friday” – some take it to mean dark, angry, depressing, as in the supposed mood of thousands of foul-tempered shoppers, fighting over the last Oakland Raiders XL fleece jacket at the Crenshaw Wal-Mart.  In  actuality it means “profitable”, as in the phrase “in the black”, so it’s intended to carry good connotations.

Yet another example of language that can suggest different things to different people, which I need to keep in mind for Crowdify.  I may have to write a blog post about this on my Crowdify blog, which would mean I would need to get that blog working again after many months of disuse.  Which would mean I’d need to dust off my Perl/MYSQL skills (shakes fist at WordPress).  Which would mean I’d need to find the motivation…endless backwards branching from the leaf, to the twig, to the branch, to the trunk, to the root, to the earth itself.  Is nothing easy anymore?

Tomorrow I race in my first 5K in many years.  To prepare, I slept 11 hours.  Well, let’s just say that was the excuse.   I had briefly considered going to the gym this morning for a light workout but, hm, felt disinclined to do so for a variety of reasons.  Instead I stayed in bed a while longer and let my mind race over everything I have coming up, which is a lot – and yet also a just a little, when you tilt your head and look at it in just the right way.  Which way to perceive it?  That, my friends, is the endless struggle.  How to look at our lives and decide how to interpret circumstances.

I’ve been reading Martin Heidegger recently, and on the one hand it’s nice to get lost in philosophy, but on the other hand he’s a real bear, syntactically speaking.  The book is “Poetry, Language, Thought” (he disdains the and that one might reasonably put in the title) and it has some gems about truth and beauty and origin and connectedness, so I’ll keep reading.  I may pick up an old book I have called “The Enlightenment Reader” next, which I first read years ago, but which is probably due for a re-read.

What else?  Saw a request put out for volunteers to do a stair-climb challenge next week and offered up my name.  That sounds fun, and I can climb stairs better than anyone else my size I know so we’ll see.  It may be too late – the team may be full – and it looks like I may not know until Monday, what with all the people taking the day off today.

Overtly and consciously preoccupied with keeping busy today.  Started early with some work from Herkimer Coffee in the U-District, followed by a coffee meetup with someone with whom I run in the same circles online, but who I had never met in person.  Hello William Carleton, Esq.!  Great to finally get to know you IRL and trade blogging tips and tricks.  If you are a startup junky like me, you’ll enjoy Bill’s stuff at http://www.wac6.com/, and he’s syndicated on Seattle 2.0 and BigStartups as well (and a couple other places too, I think).  Nice guy.  Good writer.  Good at his job.  All in all, a great guy to get to know.

Next: a phone call re: side project, which is in that last-minute get-some-stuff-out-the-door phase – a normal coordination/tension/communication funhouse, nothing unusual.  It’s actually sort of fun to work in a completely virtual environment now and then.

Keeping busy…

Appointments, the second of which was with my new eye doctor, who looks and acts sort of like a cross between John Goodman and … another actor whose face and voice I can totally envision, but whose name (and roles) escape me for the moment.  He tells me I have a scar on each cornea.  I’m thinking to myself as he tells me this, “In the grand scheme of things, given everything that’s going on right now, a scar on my cornea is really about as insignificant as a grain of sand in the desert.”  But I suppose I should take his advice and swap out my contacts more often.  I go back in a few weeks for a fitting.

Picked up a check, which is always nice, especially considering the source.  Deposited it.  Thought like a VC and wished it were for 10X.

Went to the gym and busted my ass on the treadmill.  This is my last hard workout before this weekend’s 5K, and I ran HARD.  I did intervals, and ran as fast on the treadmill as I think I ever have. To put this in context, though, consider I didn’t start running on treadmills until after college.  I think I could pull a 6:30 or 7-minute mile right now, but for the 5K I’m shooting for a 9 minute per mile pace.  If I get that, I’ll be happy.  It’s a baseline, and the point is to get a time under my belt that I can improve upon.  I’m already thinking about signing up for the Jingle Bell Run next month.

Got blown off for a conference call with a new business acquaintance, which almost never happens anymore.  I think this is because your reputation for things like reliability, promptness, follow-through are all so exposed in this new online era.  Perhaps this person got hit by a bus.  I don’t know.  For the record: I hope he didn’t get hit by a bus.  I’m just saying it was strange.

Back to Starbucks to work (keeping busy!) and to blog a bit, and consider an upcoming change of venue on Friday that is being imposed/offered/granted/thrust upon me.  It is what it is, and I am going to try to take the attitude of making lemonade out of it, despite all sorts of complicated feelings I have about the subject.  What can one do, but do one’s best?  Exactly.

Friday I’m back to work at my normal job, and it should be a fairly relaxed day.  I know my team has kept things humming along during my absence this week.

This weekend will be a period of huge adjustment for me and I hope to get through it mostly whole and mostly unscathed and mostly happy.  Of course by Sunday I’ll have written six additional blog posts.  Speaking of blogging – someone close to me told me that my blog was “weird” and that if they were just getting to know me, they would think I was weird too.  I wonder, dear reader, if you feel the same way?  Or is that an opinion shared only by those who don’t spend a lot of time online?  Is the near-real-time, overly-exposed side of me that appears in this blog a refreshing bit of authenticity, or is it (to borrow a formerly trendy term) an overshare?  Curious to hear what others think.

“Create a conference call in three lines of code.”

Sounds too good to be true, but Twilio has just announced the ability to set up conference calls via the Twilio API and TwiML markup language.  From their press release:

Sick of those crappy conference lines? The ones that that require you to enter your conference id, participant pin, access code, weight in kilograms and pi to fourteen digits before you can get to chatting? Now you can build your own with just a few lines of code. Ready?

Twilio conferencing adds new REST and TwiML elements to allow bridging two or more in-progress call sessions. Just <Dial> a <Conference>, and specify the name of the "Room"… any callers who dial the same room will be conferenced together… it’s that easy!

I’ve been working on and off with Twilio this year and am super impressed with the team, the technology, and the consistent stream of updates they’re making.  Telephony-enabled applications are a breeze using Twilio, and if you’re considering adding a phone icon to your Visio architectural diagram, you should seriously check out Twilio.

Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur and the author of the critically-acclaimed The Four Steps To the Epiphany, recently gave a talk at the Lean Startup Meetup in San Francisco last week.  It’s a great talk, and well worth your time if you yourself are an entrepreneur.

Excerpt about startups and customer development:

1. Startups weren’t small versions of large companies
2. Startups are about learning/discovery, not execution
3. Entrepreneurs and their VCs were executing on guesses
4. The facts are outside your building

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/326506/sgblank_lsc_large.mov

UPDATE: This version of the movie stalls out about two thirds of the way through, as Steve is talking in front of a slide titled “The Metrics”.  It’s mystifying to me why QuickTime doesn’t show you elapsed time / remaining time in its movies.  And I have to upgrade to a Pro account to save a QuickTime movie locally?  Go fuck yourselves, Apple.

Here’s a lower-res version that hopefully won’t stall:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/326506/sgb_lsc_19_nov_09_small.mov

Dave Winer, with whom I’ve had an on-again, off-again reading relationship over the last few years, has really struck home with his most recent post on Natural Born Bloggers.

Not everyone was born to blog, but some people were. […] NBBs annoy the hell out of you. And if they’re good, they get you to think. There’s the big value in having us around. We foster thinking.

When I say someone is a Natural Born Blogger, it’s the highest praise I know. I am not annoyed by them, but I know that often people are annoyed by me. I don’t plan to change.

I love it.  I would like to think that I’m a NBB. I have a lot to say, I’m opinionated, well-read, not afraid to call bullshit on something, and probably annoy the hell out of some people.  But I love writing, I love the craft, the art, the audience, the readers, and the ability I have to express myself through the written word.

Go read his piece.  That’s my one recommendation for the day.

Downloading and installing the Java SE Development Kit Update 17, which is quite a mouthful.  It turns out that one of the projects I’m working on – a .NET project, nominally – requires Java for some of the deployment tasks.  Yes, that sound you hear is me scratching my head.  But it’s all good.  About to wrap up a phase and feel a bit like Julie Moss in the 1982 Hawaii Ironman – crawling to the finish line.

The good news is I’ve learned a ton about the environment, the configuration, the setup, etc. etc.  So I’m on much better ground to recommend and implement future fixes, should they be necessary.

What else?  Had (or rather was presented with) the opportunity to go back and read a bunch of old blog posts last night.  It’s strange to read myself after the fact – it’s something I rarely do – and it reinforced for me the temporal nature of my posting.  I’m not consistent, thematically or in tone.  I suppose the voice is authentic – it’s actually ME writing, and not some third-party “author” whose guise I adopt while blogging.  But boy, do I wear my heart on my sleeve some days.

Went to the dentist yesterday, for the first time in a while – new X-rays, cleaning, polishing – and my teeth still are a little sore today.  They recommend a salt-water rinse and ibuprofen, neither of which I’ve done.  Oh well.  Spent most of the remainder of the day working, and capped it off with a meeting re: Crowdify with an interested party, so my motivation to continue moving ahead with that project is doubled.  I have a two- to three-month plan in my head, which I *really* need to lay out on (digital) paper, then start knocking off deliverables.

Yesterday morning was my son Will’s first-ever parent-teacher conference, and his teacher Mrs. Anderson is very happy with his progress.  He’s doing well in all the academic subjects; he’s polite and gets along well with the other kids in class.  Seeing examples of his work was both fun and sad – fun to see what’s he’s doing, and how far he’s come – but sad in that he’s growing up so quickly.

Trying hard to fight off the glums today.  Going to focus on work all day and see if I can type my way out of it.  Tap, tap, tap goes the keyboard: tick, tick, tick goes the clock; beat, beat, beat goes the heart.